Immunological diseases encompass a wide variety of disorders, affecting a steadily increasing proportion of people living in modern societies. Immunological diseases include multiple sclerosis, systemic lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and cancer.During the past decade, dramatic advances have been made in understanding mechanisms regulating the immune system, its pathological processes, and processes of immune deviation. As such, it was recognized that systemic or organ-specific inflammatory, infectious and autoimmune conditions share basic mechanisms of initiation and progression. Further elucidation of these mechanisms promises to be of very high value for diagnosis and treatment of these disorders.

13-07-2009. MUGEN partner F. Granucci's group at UNIMIB defines a new role for CD14, a molecule that recognises lipopolysaccharide LPS of bacterial cell wall. In their paper in Nature the researches show that CD14 regulates dendritic cell apoptosis after LPS stimulation via an NFAT-dependent pathway.

03-06-2009. MUGEN partner Martin Bachmann's group at Cytos Biotechnology shed light to the mechanism of action of Tregs. The researchers show that secreted phospholipase A2 is selectively produced by natural Tregs and acts as a potent suppressor of T cell activation both in vitro and in vivo. The results will be published in the upcoming issue of PNAS